“Обнаженная” публичность литературы русской эмиграции (И.А. Бунин в центре публичной сферы)

Abstract

In this article, Jürgen Habermas’s concepts of literary publicity and the literary public sphere opposed to political publicity are applied to self-consciousness and forms of literary process organization in Russian first-wave emigration. In the absence of political publicity, literary publicity absorbed its functions and turned into autonomous, “naked” publicity, the only kind possible. In this situation, literary publicity was forced to look for objects of controversy and confrontation, and found them in the émigré politicians, the authorities in the USSR, and the local (French) authorities. From this point of view, émigré writers acquire the key function of the official representation of the “lost” Russia. I.A. Bunin is a major example of this. The influence of this paradigm on the outlook of emigration is traced using examples from memoirs and fiction.